


Window

by Raynidreams



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Gen, New Caprica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raynidreams/pseuds/Raynidreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New Caprica and all its madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Window

**Title: Window**   
**Rating: M (for cannon consistent themes at this point.)**   
**Pairing: Kara and Leoben**   
**Setting: New Caprica**   
**Word: 3,700 approx.**

* * *

Bound, they walked her down the steps, two of them together, until one shifted back while the other kept his hands tightly wrapped around her forearms. The room into which they led her was dark and empty, lit only by a thin barred window high above that shed a bitter light down onto the restrained figure lying unconscious on a pad on the floor.

"This is what you made of him, Kara. This is your doing."

Then without another word they led her away to her own prison, one filled with light and comfort. She swore at them as they moved her, kicking out hard, then harder when she saw how the set-up of it was so wrong. If anything, she would have preferred his prison next door because the significance of that environment, if not who dreamt within it, she understood.

In her cell, it was a day before they allowed her the freedom to walk around with her hands unbound. A day only, and yet even so, the damage to the skin on her wrists was already done. Deep loops of bruised and blackened flesh that they carefully bandaged up while telling her that she must behave or the freedom would be revoked. They spoke in a manner that of an adult to a child. Burning within, she didn't respond to the affront. Both she and they knew that in having taken them off she would not bow down, however they couldn't leave her tied-up thus forever. She remained mute while they worked, allowing them to tend to her. She likewise remained distant for the rest of the night, sitting quietly in the chair looking at nothing with her tender wrists placed carefully in her lap.

It was a state of play that she kept up all throughout that evening, and the one who stayed with her watched her suspiciously, just waiting for the extra quick step that would result in pain; then to either wake in a bath gasping for air, or euthanized first, to wake the same way. It was a long day. The longest day: until outside (at last), the curfew alarm shrilled out dangerously and he finally stood, announcing an end to the silent war between them.

"I'm going to bed now, if you'd like to join me?" he asked lightly, pausing by the corridor towards the bedroom.

She didn't look up or acknowledge him in anyway. He took the rejection calmly enough and then unlocked the cabinet which held her blankets and pillow. "I'll see you in the morning, Starbuck," was his goodnight before he left.

The shadows shifted across the room slowly, and in time came awakening moans from the cell next door. A trilling orchestra of pain that combined in with the sounds of sex from another. Screams that echoed from out-of-sight, all over: these sour notes counterbalanced by the distant insectile hum of Raiders overhead.

She stood eventually, her movements soft, then unwound the pristine bandages with a deliberate slowness, removing the linen ream at a time, until one wrist was clear and then the other. She dropped the cloth from one wrist carelessly onto the floor, before rounding the corner holding onto the other. With it, she made her way into his room. He woke at her entrance - his eyes closed and then instantly open in knowing. He didn't move as she approached and settled herself over him. Didn't even fight back when she wrapped it around his throat twice and then tightened the ends. They'd suspected that she would do this, but equally they'd felt that she needed the release; a cleansing death to make the birth of what would grow, pure.

He thrashed towards the end. His body not resigned to dying even if his mind and will were. It made no difference. She was strong and determined enough and soon he grew still. She released the rags and then tumbled his body onto the floor to settle into the warm space vacated and created before his body had died.

Next to her rooms, the madman screamed louder, then descended into cackles of pure joy.

When they came in the morning for the body, she was no longer in the bed but crouched in the corner watching them with sparkling eyes; her lip curled up in satisfaction. Between them, a hopeful agreement had been drawn that in beating one of them once, it would now reinforce to her the level of power that she held over them. That the walls were not only made of concrete and stone. It was with this reasoning that they took her to see him again.

In his cell, she found him free from drugs and sitting up this time, though with his body curled in on itself. And at their entrance high above, he started to laugh – it was the soulless sound that she remembered from the night before. He burst free with it, shaking and forming tormented sounds that beat in time with each of their slapping steps down, until at the bottom when he stopped suddenly, and smiled directly at her.

She ceased fighting against the hands that held her and then froze.

He bowed his head a little – a spurious salute - then the first words out of his mouth came. "I've not been sleeping. It stinks too much in here." He laughed again before turning up to look at the barred window. His eyes flickering from side to side, as if he were watching the passage of a train or perhaps a dust mote in the air, though no beams elongated down in which to see one dance. And as if he'd read her thoughts, he cawed delightedly, "There's no light today; the world is overcast." Then his eyes stopped flickering and widened a little on the tiny hole, high above. He tilted his head to one side, ear inched up towards it as if he could hear something that no one else could. "And the water tastes like sandy ash after passing through dead grasslands."

Behind her, one of her captors again sentenced her with, "This is what you did to him."

Then they took her away once more.

That night she heard him talking to himself clearly. He talked about the past, about a nameless mind death that swept them all away in a flood. About a child who was real and one who wasn't. She went to sleep while listening to him ranting. The highs and lows of his voice patterned like some ghastly lullaby.

In the darkness behind her eyes she was drawn her aloft, up to a barred window from which she heard a sermon that made no sense. Below her, he tried to explain the message but all his words were backwards and she stayed up by the barred window for a long time but saw nothing outside to explain it any better and so decided to close her ears and eyes to everything else.

It was a curious dream, and one that quickly slipped into another, this one to show them in her old apartment as it was before Zak died. It was neat and tidy, the walls not carved at and attacked by wrathful muses, but lined with framed artwork. At the table, he lit candles and then placed a meal before her. His blond hair gleaming in the light. She smiled at him tenderly and then passed him a glass to sip from as he offered her the bread basket. She chuckled that he should take it next door as their neighbour would need the energy if he was to keep up his moaning. He laughed back with the scent of her wine on his breath and then soon they moaned together on the floor of their home.

_In this dream, they slipped into one another._

A shadow passed over her, and she awoke shuddering with an emotion that was not quite disgust before scrambling up and off the sofa in anticipation of an attack that didn't come. She was greeted instead by a placid smile and the offer of food. It was like her dream but in the harsh light of day she had no illusions about what this was.

Many more days passed, weeks even, and twice more she was able to kill him after the monotony had become too much. Both of these acts of revenge happening at the dining table. In the first, she bludgeoned him with the hard metal of a chair back. Repeatedly slamming it into his head even after the bubbles of air in the blood at his lips had stopped; ignorant or uncaring of the sprays of red that became splattered across the walls in artistically linked arcs.

The second time she did it came after she had been compliant and offered to fetch the plates; using the pretence to come up from behind him while he was praying over the food. She slammed his face into and straight through the glass table top, and then grinned at the mess left afterward, wondering whatever had possessed them to install a glass table. She was able to see her broken reflection come back at her from its shiny surface and in the glossy red paint his blood had become.

_She smiled._

After each of these visits, they again took her to see him. She was unsure as to why the first two times, but after the incident with the chair, when they stood her there for an hour until she started to shake from the horror of his gibberish and sunken, wild-eyed form, it seemed to become clear.

_This was atonement._

It was after the destruction of the table, she got left there alone, chained by the door with him forever confined below. He cried up the whole time, both at her and at the path of light from the window imploringly asking for direction.

"What is the path? We're pigeons and doves down here, scratching at the earth." He said, over and over, while picking at the skin around his raw fingers, biting at the ravaged flesh of his lips. She noted that his hair had started to fall out and that his throat was bruised in the shape of large hands.

By the time they returned for her after this visit, her hands were clasped over her ears and her eyes shut. And at this, the Leobens believed that they might be getting through to her. Below her, he screamed when they touched her on the shoulder, then started shouting incoherent nonsense when they lifted her up and once more led her from the awfulness of his room. But as the door closed however, she caught his eye, and his red-blue gaze fixed solely upon her. All of a sudden, she had the impression that it was his sickness that had pervaded the walls and had been soaked up into the very atmosphere.

It was only after this visit that she eventually asked about him and about what had caused him to end up like that. She also, haltingly, asked after who had caused the bruises to his throat. And because she had asked, he told her the truth.

He took a seat and gestured for her to do the same, the table remnants having been cleared and a replica sunk into its place.  _Replica_ , just like the man who sat opposite her. He regarded her with a slight sardonic smile creasing up his lips; one which she returned with equal (and fake) aplomb.

"So, you want to know about him?"

She sighed and got up, affecting a boredom that was hard to maintain after what she'd seen. (Knowing that he had deduced how the questions burnt within her now.) She walked into the bathroom and shut herself within it, then pressed herself against the door, wanting to know whilst also fuming at how much he knew that she did.

"He came back wrong. The passage from you to resurrection too far and too arduous. It broke something inside of him at the same time as it released something else. The poetry of madness; the face of God." Kara slid down the door, shaking like she had in his cell earlier on. At hearing what she'd already discerned. To cover for herself, she lurched upwards to turn on the tap and let the water run, before collapsing back. There came a long pause from him in which she distantly heard the noise of him getting up and moving away from the table, coming closer to the door. At his approach, she contemplated killing herself, like she almost had in one of her dreams. Dreams, the like of which, she'd never known before. Ones created from this listless inactivity; her mind left with only his words to focus on and rehash. In the dream he'd come in moments after she'd made the first puncture wound and then asked her (maybe himself), how he could make her understand the life she could have. Then he'd kissed her and started to weep: transforming into the madness she saw and heard next door.

The voice outside started up again, nearer, startling her back to herself.

"He woke up screaming in the chamber. His first gasp a yell of fear and exhilaration but nothing we could say would calm him or douse the frenetic animation of his words or body. He spoke on and on about the stream and you; reaming off the past about how you'd suffered, about how you'd been hurt and would only hurt others now, for that's what damage to the soul does – it rebounds its pain unwittingly, uncaring, in an effort to free itself. He said so many things about you in this distracted way; as if he were repeating what another had told him but out of order. When we tried to ask him clear questions about you, he would then go oddly silent, then look afraid."

There came a slight thump from the other side of the door, and she understood that he now rested against it, in a mirror of how she did her side.

"He told us that we would find you and the humans again. That a Six, so poisoned by her sisters and brothers, both machine and man, would not act like you and try to live, but would think to only punish herself yet in doing so, take many with her. He told us this, and we believed. We also believed, now know, that we had to keep you alive. Must. You gave the visions to him. You tortured him and he revealed Kobol. You found him and he saw your destiny. He was killed because you couldn't save him and now he sees more than anyone."

Kara exhaled by degrees at this, then crawled forward into the water spilling all over the floor. He pushed the door open to find her soaking wet on the floor.

"Do you understand now, Kara?" he asked, crouching in the frame.

"His visions are the reason I am here?"

"No quite. All of us dream of you now. We see parts, if not everything."

Despite herself, she had to know. "How can you leave him like that? He's one of you. More than one."

The Leoben uncurled and grabbed a cloth to begin to wipe down the surfaces, leaving her to sit in the water until she was ready to stand. She didn't think he was going to reply but he did anyway.

"We wondered at first if the new body of his was at fault so we put him down and he downloaded again, but this time… too many fragments came away in the stream and we all saw some of your past and the light that glimmers around you. It hurt, like staring at the sun for too long. This is the best we can offer him aside from putting him into an eternal, but not complete, sleep."

She didn't ask anymore, but he seemed to know her question. "The bruises at his throat are our doing; he's refused to feed himself and so we must do it for him."

Kara looked down at her reflection in the dirty water for a moment, then spoke up. "Perhaps I might get him to eat?"

He stilled a moment, then carried on cleaning up. There was a slight softening to the edges of his mocking smile where it gentled into something more genuine.

Later, Kara, dressed in black, was taken to him. She'd allowed  _her_  clothes to be taken for drying and these to be replaced with the ones which she accepted from them. The ones they'd been hoping she'd take for months. At the top of the stairs, she hovered, a single beam of light coming through his bared window and blinding her briefly, before she walked down the steps bearing food and water for him; her heart fluttering in her breast and in her hands and bare feet.

They shut the door behind her, though stayed close, leaving her with him to be enlightened. But to her, this was no lesson. She sat down before him and took in every bit of damage to his body: his blackened neck, the lacerations on his face where they'd tried to shave him and he'd shifted abruptly, slicing his skin; the bruises above his eyebrow where he'd banged his head up against the wall. Everything. He was a picture of dreadful piety.

"You're insane," she muttered as he stared back at her. He stopped screaming and ranting, and a strange sort of willowy kindness came into his eyes.

"Of course, but no more than you are. No more than this life."

She snorted. Then shifted her hands to his throat. "I'm going to kill you."

He laughed again as if to remind her of before – the sound hi-pitched and crazed, "I know, and I love you for it."

Outside, the others could not get in fast enough before she had the right spot and had snapped the base of his neck. He slumped down the wall, lifeless; his leg having kicked over her offerings and soaked her new clothes.

The next day she was back to her own garb. The change back seemed to agree with her (on the surface) as she acted pleasantly enough to the Leoben with her, just as she did on the day after, and the one after that; for a week or more. The one (or many, for she wasn't sure about any of them but him) didn't mention the incident and neither did they offer any praise or comment over her sudden compliance. They only thanked her carefully when she laid the table or put away her bedding and books. She did wonder if she was fooling them with her congenial game in the same thought that she wondered if she was fooling herself that there was any game being played here where she was a player and not the game itself.

Once more, however, the contest came to a point – too long had she allowed the walls to close in on her – this thought coming as she set the plates to the perfect angle, with the forks by their side. As she worked, she found herself trying to pick-up on his distant voice long after it was gone. She twisted her plate and then admired her fork - it was sharp enough. Sharp enough to kill him, or herself, she mused, then placed it down with the same precision that she used to, a bird.

It is the skewer she uses instead, though. The one she'd been hiding. In and out, over and over; her heart thudding with exertion as his body stirred weakly and then went limp and wet below her thighs.

She'd killed him five times now, he told her when he came back. And it was strange, because for all his humour as he returned, he seemed unsettled; edgy. He then told her what they'd all seen will happen - that she will love and embrace him. (Them.) She retorted with what she'd said to the other one she'd murdered next door,  _"You're insane."_

After he'd departed for bed that night, she rested back a moment until she thought she saw a chance to escape but only seconds later to be screaming in bitter rage as she hopelessly smacked against the barrier beyond the barrier. And as she screamed, she realised that half of her was listening again, having become used to, and was expecting to hear his answering, joining, chortle of insanity. But all that came back was silence and the memory of:  _Neck, click, fall –_  nothing else.

Her face did not fit through the bars far enough to try and break her own here, and strung out, it was too late that the thought to try and jump over the stairs occurred to her. Hands gripped and pinned her until the rage passed enough so that she could function properly once more.

Shortly after this, the child was brought to her. The child, her child - as she was told. A gift, more precious than anything else. A gift of life. She resented the little one at first. Part of her hearing in the child's bubbling laughter his previous cackles, or the sounds made in blood from dying lips. It took a couple of days for her to disassociate the three and to stop hearing them as one.  _To stop wishing for them to be the sounds of the other laugh._  But by then the child had fallen and so had she; no longer able to deny the life of the girl and all it offered her.

Far away, Leoben felt as her hand gripped his brother's, and at the touch, he blinked awake and then cried out.

Days later, and left to drift after all his brothers had gone, he found the girl alone and sobbing like he had at Kara's downfall. He comforted her while he waited for Kara to return and when she appeared, he gave the child back. His only price a kiss and the words of a dream spoken out loud. And as he died again, he kept her broken look with him; his faded eyes bathed in the light from the large, now open window.


End file.
